sickle clowns in Notting Hill

Heard this the other day, and it was a revelation. I had forgotten how wonderfully loose and fluid the Pretty Things were circa Parachute (1970; Rolling Stone's record of the year).  It's also a great curio from a particular time and place: Notting Hill, late 60s. The Pretties were hanging with the  new hippie bands in the 'hood: with the Pink Fairies, the E. Broughton Band, the Deviants, and Hawkwind.  the hippie dream was still alive, but just barely: it was altogether an edgier, angrier,  aggressively anti-social crew.  But as you can hear here, the Rock was doing just fine. Something in the water or the dope seemed to have made for wonderfully loose, effortlessly expressive playing. This track percolates nicely all the  way through: no mean feat, for a seven minute song (I never realized the length till now, which tells you something): 

I don't work, I just speed

"That's all I nee-eed!"

"Just in case..."

been a long time been a long time been a long

The Stones' Rock and Roll Circus program was filmed 43 years ago today.

Tony Iommi recalls: "The Who were there and Taj Mahal and all the people who were in the movie, but I didn't know a soul and felt like a spare dinner."

Also: "half the people in that show are now dead. John Lennon, Keith Moon, Brian Jones, Mitch Mitchell. .. it's a Rock and Roll Circus all right." 

My Friend Jackie told me that John Cage conceived of a Music Circus as a populist avant-garde event. More on that when I catch up on my Cage...

RR Circus, Part 3 of 3

To sum up: The Rock and Roll Circus film attempts, in true counterculture spirit, to act out the community it wishes to create. The Stones used their concert film to communicate two messages simultaneously: their new, subversive artistic ambitions and abilities, as well as their solidarity with the revolutionary aims of the counterculture. How well does that work out for them, you may well ask. I will let you decide. Yes, this is where the paper gets interactive! I want to close by viewing what a clip of the final song of the film, where the cast joins in a performance of “Salt of the Earth.” The song is by Jagger/Richards and is on the Stones’ Beggars Banquet album, released less than a week prior to filming the Rock and Roll Circus.

That album would go on to receive commercial success and considerable critical acclaim in the nascent rock press (cf. Jon Landau's review in Rolling Stone; the band was praised for returning to and focusing on the straight ahead, heavy blues rock that many fans and critics believed suited the group best. In retrospect, though, "heavy” does not adequately describe the sound or overall feel of Beggars’ Banquet. There's a strong emphasis on acoustic blues on the record, , rather than the urban electric blues of Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf. Old time gospel blues like “Prodigal Son” sit alongside English folk songs like “Factory Girl,” or the pastoral folk rock ballad, “No Expectations.” (It’s worth recalling that the only actual musical performance in the Performance movie is a brief scene of Jagger singing an acoustic blues, Robert Johnson’s “Come On in My Kitchen”).

With characteristic insouciance, the Stones rewrite “Salt of the Earth,” a expression of alienation from the masses, into a populist rallying cry for the film. Originally, “Salt of the Earth” was the final track on Beggars Banquet, where it put a question mark to the calls for revolution in “Street Fighting Man” or indictments of class hypocrisy (“Jigsaw Puzzle”) elsewhere on the record. “Salt of the Earth” also demonstrates the new reach and attainment of Jagger the lyricist, with its carefully cultivated ambiguity. The song’s chorus proposes a toast to the “common people.” The invitation to a communal sing-along is complicated by the introduction of much darker images of the working class; the chorus seems to proclaim a refined alienation from the masses. (circulate lyric sheet)*

(I showed the "Salt of the Earth" clip on DVD; YouTube has the clip as well, but only with the audio track. I've posted it here. Note Jagger’s Dylanesque phrasing; his rising intonation, suggesting distaste, when he sings “wife and his children”; most important, there are the ad-lib, revised lyrics: “they don’t look real to me” to “do we all look real to you?” It seems a pretty weak attempt to open up the song to a broad audience. It’s as if Jagger realizes in the moment, as cameras were rolling, that there's no way to present the song as a rousing, unambiguous, populist anthem.) 

(from Beggars')

(from RR Circus)

(For the hell of it: I never knew this existed! Admit it, you want to see the Rose/Jagger summit)

Although the Rock and Roll Circus was finally released on VHS in 1996, we still don’t know the specifics as to why the Stones, specifically Jagger, never tried to air their movie. Speculations include that the Stones acknowledged that they were bested by the Who’s performance (the Stones had taken the stage at 3 AM, at the end of a twelve hour shoot).* For me, the "Salt of the Earth" segment suggests another reason why Jagger might have decided to shelve the film. The scene demonstrates the gap that remained between the populist form that the Stones adopted for their movie and the band’s aesthetic, which, now more than ever, entailed the relentless pursuit of transgression aimed at alienating segments of the mass audience. The Rock and Roll Circus was intended to swallow whole all the contradictions that inhered in the idea of the commercial artist; it ended up strangling on them.  

A few years later, the Stones would release their double album Exile on Main Street, perhaps the first dystopian rock record.  Many songs on the album thematize the dissolution of the counterculture explicitly (“Soul Survivor,” “Shine a Light,”), others (“Stop Breaking Down,” “Casino Boogie”) seem to offer an allegory for surviving into a post-revolutionary era (one where revolutionary hopes that once were raised are now dashed). I have described The Rock and Roll Circus as a project based on dreams, several strands of them in fact, woven together.  Unintentionally, the film has become a melancholy testament to the dissolution of the counterculture ideal, at the very moment when it seemed that rock and revolution had finally taken over the world.    

Performance Interlude

I've alluded to this in some other posts, but here's another reminder that the Roeg/Cammell film Performance seems to have become a touchstone for some British indie rock bands of the 80s and 90s. 


The Godfathers allude to the East End gangsters in the film, both  in their wardrobe and by copying the mise-en-scene for "Memo from Turner" in the video for the unrelenting "Birth, School, Work, Death." I've written about this in an earlier blog; that song is particular favorite of mine for picking up the Nihilist flag flown briefly by the Sex Pistols in "Holidays in the Sun" and "God Save the Queen": 

\

There's not much that separates "Memo from Turner" in Performance from the Godfathers song; they share a stylized nihilism. Stranger perhaps, is the link between Performance and Oasis' breakthrough single, "Live Forever." The open hearted optimism of Oasis seems a million miles away from the ambiance of Performance. The latter is aggressively cult minded; the former imagines a mass audience that the band was fortunate enough to reach with the record. 

I suppose a kind of formalism was second nature to Oasis, so that they copied the form of Performance without considering content...

The Stones, Art and Politics, part 2

An unexpected thing happened on the way to the Stones making the concert film that would represent, among other things, their populist politics.  Mick Jagger, the Stones’ lead singer, songwriter, as well, as, in Robert Christgau’s words, the band member responsible “for bringing concept to the group’s music,” became a convert to artistic modernism (Rolling Stone Illustrated History). I argue that Jagger’s experience acting in Performance, a film by directors Nicholas Roeg and Donald Cammell, was clarifying for the singer in regard to his intuitive modernist aesthetic.  I believe the film helped shape Jagger and the Stones’ new ambitions for rock as art as seen in the Rock and Roll Circus. The paradox is worth noting: that a musical agenda was set by the experience of making an experimental film. 

Performance, with its open-ended approach to narrative and film making was a box office failure, and far too weird for mainstream success. Like many other such films, it has since garnered critical acceptance and a small but devoted cult following. I’m presuming that devotees of the film are not out in force tonight, and that a plot synopsis and some historical background will be useful. Here I will be drawing mostly from Barry Miles’ recent book, London Calling (2010). Miles book is a compendium of avant-garde activity in London since the end of World War II; rock music is not his exclusive topic, but Miles, wisely enough, includes an account of the making of Performance in his encyclopedic survey of counter culture efforts to “transform society” (3).

The wording of the publicity handout for Performance not only provides a sketch of the plot, but is full of phrases redolent of the era. Performance is the story of “[a] strange electronic poet, a latter-half-of-the-twentieth-century writer who has retired from the pop scene and established himself in an opulent life style accompanied by two young women. His privacy is shattered by the unexpected arrival of a gangster, on the run from both the police and his underworld colleagues for murder, who is seeking shelter.” Indeed, the first half of the film features Chas Devlin, played by James Fox, and depicts his gangster life style: at home, involved in sado-masochistic sex with his submissive girl friend Dana, and at work, where we see Chaz in numerous, disturbing scenes of graphic violence, brutally beating anyone who runs afoul of Harry Flowers, Chaz’s gangster boss. 

When Chas takes shelter in Turner’s flat, on the run from Flowers’ gang, the movie makes a drastic shift in tone. What had been an unusually violent gangster film quickly becomes a “head” movie. Random images disrupt narrative continuity. Chaz and Turner take part in role playing games, share girlfriends, and take a lot of drugs. The main purpose of these mind games seems to be a refashioning of haz’s gender identity. Pherber (played by Anita Pallenberg, Keith Richards’ girlfriend at the time) persuade the macho Chas to wear a wig and make-up and generally explore his feminine side. (As played by Jagger, Turner has clearly already gone a long way toward exploring his androgynous side, a point to which I will return to later).    

In the movie’s final scenes, Flowers’ henchmen locate Chas in Turner’s flat, and offer to take him on a ride. Knowing that he will be killed, Flowers’ men let Chas say goodbye to Turner.  Here is Barry Miles’ succinct description of the enigmatic end of the film: “In perhaps the film’s most discussed scene, Chas draws his gun and shoots Turner in the head, the camera following the path of the bullet into Turner’s brain. The film ends with Chas being led to Flower’s Roll-Royce parked outside, but as the car pulls away, it is Turner/Jagger’s face that we see in the window” (268).

Though highly original, Performance was not without precedent in British cinema; Cammell’s influences include Joseph Losey’s The Servant (1963), also starring James Fox, and John Boorman’s thriller, Point Blank (1967). However, Cammell’s chief influence, experimental film maker Kenneth Anger, suggests the real reference point for Performance:  a modernist tradition of avant-garde art. From the Symbolists to the Surrealists, avant-gardes have been obsessed with magic and occult systems such as alchemy and the Cabbala. The debts to the literary avant-garde in the film are as evident as Anger’s influence. William S. Burroughs’ writing is a constant presence in the film, both explicitly and in a series of in-jokes. Pherber suggests that they call Dr. Burroughs to give an injured Chas “a shot”; Hasan-I-Sabbah’s maxim, “Nothing is true, everything is permitted,” a mantra of Burroughs’ writing in the sixties from Minutes to Go (1960) onward, is solemnly quoted by Turner in the film.* Turner also relates the story of the Old Man of the Mountain and his docile army of drug fuelled hashisheen, or “assassins,” another tale often iterated by Burroughs. Moreover, Cammell’s final edit of the film utilized Burroughs’ cut-up methods, with its random juxtaposition of images; cut-up editing dominates the last, trippy half of the movie.

 Cammell visited Anthony Balch, Burroughs’ film collaborator, to learn the editing technique he used for their experimental film, The Cut Ups (1966). Another reference point for Performance is Jorge Luis Borges, whose book, A Personal Anthology, was published in March of 1968 and quickly became a cult classic in “hip” circles; Turner/Jagger reads aloud from the book in the film (Miles ).

As I hope my synopsis makes clear, Cammell’s desire was not so much to direct a film as create a “happening,” an event that would alter perception, dissolve the stable self, and trouble the boundaries between art and life. In keeping with his subversive intent, Cammell hired real gangsters like David Litvinoff, a member of the infamous Krays gang until he ran afoul of the bosses, to act as consultants to the film. Litvinoff and John Bindon, who ran a protection racket as well as an acting career, quickly became the presiding spirits of Performance. Cammell had managed to execute an elaborate con game under the nose of Warner Brothers executives, who didn’t catch wind of what they were paying for until they saw the director’s cut. 

(Incidentally, every account I’ve read about the making of Performance, including Miles, repeats the story of the wife of a Warner Brothers’ studio executive throwing up at the first screening of the film in LA. I suppose the story is meant to establish beyond doubt the underground authenticity of the film; however, I think the phobic response of mainstream reviewers to the film, also cited by Miles, is proof enough of the film’s capacity for shock. Cf. Richard Schickel, writing in Time magazine: “The most disgusting, the most completely worthless film I have ever seen since I began reviewing” (267).

One can easily see how making this film would have provided Jagger with a crash course in experimental film and avant-garde literature. I would also suggest that the experience made matters of modernist form and technique a palpable concern for the singer. Obviously, Cammell’s decision to cast Jagger as a rock star wasn’t a stretch; however, Cammell constantly pushed Jagger out of his comfort zone, encouraging him to explore and cultivate a more androgynous, bisexual look, closer to Brian Jones than Jagger, but even more extreme than Jones. Typically, when Jagger felt insecure in matters of culture, he (wisely) turned to his well educated, highly cultured girlfriend, Marianne Faithfull for the answers.  She devised the solution to Jagger’s acting dilemma; at her urging, Jagger transformed himself into an uncanny hybrid of Brian Jones and Keith Richards: “You’ve got to imagine you’re poor, freaked-out, deluded, androgynous, druggie Brian, [with] a bit of Keith’s tough, self-destructive, beautiful lawlessness” (qtd. in Miles 272).

Paradoxically, Jagger’s lack of formal training as an actor meant that he was actually better prepared for the experience of making the film than a professional actor like James Fox. As a musician, Jagger was accustomed to the slow patient slog of collaborative work in a studio, as well as the art of improvisation. Jagger quickly got used to Cammell’s method of working from a plot outline rather than a script, creating the film narrative as the relationship between the actors evolved. In effect, Cammell overturned a standard pecking order where Fox the professional outranked Jagger the first time actor.  This turnaround mirrored the role reversal Cammell had put in place by casting Fox, with his upper class background, as a hoodlum, and Jagger, Fox’s social inferior, as the man of culture. The result was a heady power rush for Jagger, who started bullying Fox on the set. More reason why Jagger  “became this hybrid character and never left it,” according to Marianne Faithfull (qtd. in Miles 273). 

I want to suggest that playing this role constituted Jagger’s initiation into an older tradition of specifically modernist self-invention. My speculation is that the experience crushed any faith Jagger may have had previous in authenticity discourses, in pop music and everywhere else. Not that Jagger needed that much pushing in this regard. The collective passion of the Stones for American blues music implied the belief in the superior honesty, earthiness, expressive power, and existential authenticity of the blues over other music. This credo has often been associated with the problematic idea that the music represented a disembodied African-American essence.  Yet as Robert Christgau notes, the Stones, especially Jagger,” have never been very specific about what their passion for the blues has meant” emotionally: or politically, I would add. (Indeed, they have treated their passion for the blues as if it were pure contingency; compare Eric Clapton’s attempts in interviews and his recent biography to articulate a purely personal reason for his devotion to the blues). Jagger was never a simple imitator of blues vocal styles; to quote Christgau again, the singer “intuited from the start that their distance from the Afro-American source would be a necessary and essential part of whatever the group would do with the music.” Accordingly, Jagger’s singing enacts “his distance from the music he loved,” as a sign of his own “alienation” (222-3).

I would suggest that Jagger’s experience making Performance confirmed his intuition that, that identity was a construct, not an essence. Such an insight would forever separate him from his songwriting/musical partner, Keith Richards, who was certainly artful, but a more conventional believer in the power of music as a means to express an authentic self. 

Performance then marks not just a personal, transformative moment for Jagger, but through him, it effected a change in the Stones, as they navigated the new, heady notion that rock music was an art form, and rock groups, musical artists.

Allow me one more speculation about what Jagger might have gathered from the experience of acting in Performance.  I think the singer also learned to associate a modern experience of alienation with the greater authority of specifically modernist art. Modernist literature is full of declarations regarding the artist’s attainment of heightened states of awareness. These perceptions are inevitably found personally debilitating, even dangerous to the artist; just as clearly, the artist’s heightened perception is believed to empower the artist over the mass of humanity.  In this way, the assertion of the modernist artist to superior perception inevitably entails asserting an aesthetic hierarchy. Modernist art’s emphasis on the representation of subjectivity, of mental impressions, is promoted as an advance over “mere” realism in the arts.  Typically, the claim of French Symbolist poet Paul Verlaine to possess “painfully subtle sensibility,” becomes a proud assertion of the modernist artist’s distinction: “Particular souls are sensitive enough to receive, perceive, and decipher or be affected by their glimpses into the heart of things.”  The suicidal war veteran Septimus Smith in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Marcel in Swann’s Way (and Proust himself), Thomas Mann’s Hans Castorp, Musil’s “Man Without Qualities, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man: these are among the many artist heroes of modernist literature with distinct maladies.

The complex mixture of alienation and empowerment that Jagger experienced filming in Performance also initiated him into a longstanding practice of modernist art. He absorbed the idea from Cammell that art makes its deepest connection to the unconscious, bypassing rational thought. As Rimbaud proclaimed, the “systematic derangement of the senses” was a precondition for making modern art.  Beginning with Performance and continuing through Exile on Main Street, where Jagger relied on the cut-up technique of Burroughs for lyric writing, Jagger would subtly incorporate modernist techniques of making art. 

(In the recent Stones in Exile [2010, Grant Gee, director], Jagger downplays the avant-garde quality of the technique, suggesting that he only used it as a desperate attempt to provide content for the record, under pressure to meet deadlines. Jagger has always undercut his considerable talent as a lyricist, but this may be one of the most extreme examples of his tendency to self-deprecation. Seriously, is the cut-up any one’s first choice for a time saving device? Surely the singer is trying rather desperately to normalize his unorthodox mode of lyrical production and seem less “arty” than is the case.)    

In the case of the Rock and Roll Circus, this entailed taking the carefully assembled visual look Jagger adopted for Performance more or less intact to the sound stage in Wembley where the Rock and Roll Circus was shot, a month later. The aim was less to make a fashion statement than to trigger an unconscious response in the spectator, subliminally subverting gendered expectations for the look of the male rock singer. Recall that directors Roeg and Cammell encouraged Jagger to remake his physical appearance for the film, emphasizing an androgynous, bisexual appearance.  Again, Marianne Faithfull was a crucial catalyst; she persuaded Mick to dye his hair what she describes as “Chinese black, like Elvis’ hair” (272). The results pleased Faithfull, Jagger, and Cammell, giving the singer “a strong, graphic outline,” as well as, in Faithfull’s words, “a tinge of menace.”  Menace also describes the other inspiration for the unsettling look of Jagger/Turner, Lawrence Olivier’s Richard III, where Richard is a malignant, dark hued, pallid Goth prince. (A few years later, Shakespeare’s villain would also inspire a London Irish boy from Finchley Park, John Lydon, to transform himself into the Sex Pistols’ “Johnny Rotten” on stage). In the last song of the Stones’ concert set in the Circus film, “Sympathy for the Devil,” Jagger strips off his shirt to reveal a (drawn on) tattoo of the demon Baphomet, the infamous Goats’ Head (I’m sure you’re familiar with it from any Witches’ Sabbaths’ you may have attended!). Of course, the satanic imagery is of a piece with the song, a lyric monologue from Beelzebub himself, about the multiple catastrophes he’s caused, comprising human history). At the same time, the tattoo seems an obvious, and un-ironic homage to the Aleistar Crowley obsession shared by Cammell and Cammell’s chief aesthetic inspiration, Kenneth Anger. (Note for later: Cammell introduced Anger to Jagger; the singer would provide a spooky moog synthesizer soundtrack to Anger’s 1969 film, Invocation of My Demon Brother. 

Jagger’s moog playing seems inspired by Brian Jones’ mellotron sound on “2000 Light Years From Home”). 

 Jagger’s aim in reproducing his Performance look for the Rock and Roll Circus seems clear enough: a manipulation of signs that would work to subversive effect on the spectator’s unconscious.  

Art, Politics, and the Rock and Roll Circus

I spoke on the Stones' Rock and Roll Circus to the FSU Society of Musicology; I'm posting it here in three installments.   

 On Art, Politics, and the Rolling Stones

One. The first thing I want to say is THANK YOU so much for inviting me to talk. I’m not a musicologist, but I think we have a lot in common, mainly a commitment to interdisciplinary study. We think of music not only as a thing in itself, but as something that touches on most human endeavor. I do cultural studies of music: which means that I think a lot about how music functions in a culture, and within history. I mostly write about discourses that surround music, and that seek to make sense of it. You can’t overestimate the power of discourse to situate an object, even something as intangible and disembodied as music. This is even—perhaps especially-- true of rock music; 60s rock critics were mostly non-academics, barely credentialed members of the middle and lower middle classes. Yet within a short period, these writers had set up a canon of important rock albums mostly publishing in the free or underground press. For better or worse, their evaluations remain foundational for the study of pop and rock music today.

Tonight I will discuss the Stones’ TV film, the Rock and Roll Circus, directed by Michael Lindsey-Hogg, including some crucial events that occurred between the time the idea was hatched and the actual filming in December 1968.  The main idea of the program was to combine a select concert bill of the Stones and a few of their favorite artists with circus acts. The film seems like a curio of the times; I will argue it was much more than that; the idea points beyond itself to a desired, utopian resolution of the structural divide that separates art and social praxis.  By discussing the Stones’ film within its time, I hope to address a much broader topic, the age-old question about the relation between art and politics. I see the Rock and Roll Circus as very much part of its time, but also as a rupture in history, of the sort valued by Walter Benjamin, in his meditations on revolutionary moments.

This is the broad outline of the story I will tell tonight. For a brief period following the band’s arrests in England for drug related offences, the rock audience in Britain, particularly the student audience who identified with the burgeoning underground movement, projected their own desires for cultural transformation onto the band’s already established anti-authoritarian celebrity image. Thanks to their shrewd manager/provocateur Andrew Loog Oldham, the Stones seemed from the outset to be more than just teenage trouble makers in the tradition of first generation rockers like Jerry Lee Lewis, but revolutionary outlaws, more Che Guevara than Elvis. Whether or not this was a misreading is beside the point (although if the question of the Stones’ actual political convictions interests you, you might want to check out Stanley Booth’s remarkable account of his time touring with the band in 1969, The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones; it would seem that Keith Richards believed this fan interpretation of the band at best naïve and at worst a delusion that posed a danger to the lives of band members, and that Jagger, appropriately enough for an educated middle-class student of the London School of Economics, took bourgeois cultural radicalism pretty seriously, enough to join in the massive student protest against the American war in Viet Nam held at Grosvenor Square in May 1968, before falling largely silent on political matters in his art). What interests me is the product of all this fan projection: the Stones felt empowered to entertain new ambitions for rock music and themselves. 

As I will argue, the project of the rock and roll circus expresses a deep-rooted utopian impulse.  The TV program was meant to signify the group’s affinity with working class culture, and the Old Left, and their solidarity with a new left, represented by student activists. The circus mise en scene suggested that the roots of British rock lay in carnivalesque entertainments related to far older forms of popular culture. As I will relate, the circus project was a covert act of resistance by rock bands against a music industry that treated rock music as mere commerce. The program was also of a piece with the Stones, and British rock’s, new found art ambitions. Since the mid60s, the Stones had been making records of greater complexity and sophistication: from “19^th Nervous Breakdown,” “Lady Jane,” and “Paint it Black.” Part of my project here and in my book, British Rock Modernism, is to align these art ambitions more closely with modernist aesthetics. 

The Circus program was to highlight all of this: the new artistic sophistication of the band and their hopes for social transformation through collective action. Finally, it was an attempt to act out a utopian vision, in the manner of many 60s counterculture experiments. The film was intended to express the band’s genial assent to revolutionary change as well as showcase the new sophistication and ambition of their music. For us, the Rock and Roll Circus has a more melancholy lesson: that the tensions between art and politics were such that no amount of good intentions could resolve them. The film also suggests the seeds of the dissolution of the hippie counterculture were present even when underground culture was in the ascendant. 

Two.  On one level, the Rock and Roll Circus film was an attempt to capitalize on an unprecedented breach in the popularity of the Stones’ chief competitors in British rock, the Beatles. On Boxing Day 1967, the Beatles aired their first auteur effort to make a rock film, Magical Mystery Tour. The reception among fans and the critics was largely negative.  Unlike the Beatles, the Stones had yet to appear on film outside from the performance footage in The T.A.M.I Show (1964). There was a tentative plan for the Stones to star in a film adaptation of Dave Wallis’ dystopian novel, Only Lovers Left Alive (1964); even more tantalizing, the band’s manager Andrew Loog Oldham attempted to secure the rights to A Clockwork Orange (1962), Anthony Burgess’ novel about futuristic, ultraviolent youth gang, itself a rewriting of real-life clashes between English Mods and Rockers on Brighton Beach in the early 60s. The Rock and Roll Circus film would allow the Stones to triumph on the small screen, as a prelude to their entrée into cinema; in the process, they would finally best the Beatles, rather than follow in that band’s footsteps. 

Yet the origins of the Circus project predate the airing of Magical Mystery Tour by a few months, in an intense, late night, and probably drug fuelled discussion between Jagger, Pete Townshend, and Ronnie Lane in Olympic Studios in summer of 1967. The conversation turned to alternatives to the concert tour. Lane’s idea was to integrate a rock show with circus acts, and combine a touring band and a traveling circus. Fascinated with the circus as a child, Lane associated the fair with his working class adolescence. He had a regular job as a teenager at a summer fair in the East End. Townshend and Jagger came from more solidly middle-class families; yet they too were fascinated by the idea of a rock circus. The discussion may have had its origin in a bull session, but Jagger and Townshend would revisit the idea for many months, finally contacting American concert promoter Chip Monck.  Monk, Jagger and Townshend all batted several variations of Lane’s idea around; one version had the Stones and the Who on a mammoth tour bill along with the circus, travelling by railroad across the US, with a movie release of tour highlights as a commercial tie in. Another idea was to have an extended residency of the rock circus in a few major metropolitan areas. (Ironically, the only one of the three who actually toured in a rock circus was Ronnie Lane; after leaving the Faces in 1973, Lane’s rock/circus act travelled and played in the English north country as a caravan with tents and a ringmaster, a venture that quickly used up most of Lane’s savings left over from his more lucrative days playing stadiums with Rod Stewart and the Faces).

This brief account of the subsequent fortunes of Lane’s idea suggests that, even if the idea was made half in jest, it obtained the fascinated interest of celebrity rock stars like Jagger and Townshend. The circus idea conjured up a vision of a vanished England of the imagination, and struck a chord among the three pop stars, part of a single generation who came of age in London after the Blitz: the dreary London of debris (bomb craters), curfews, and food shortages. Lane’s idea also made a covert political statement, creating a link between British rock and the earlier, anti-authoritarian culture of the English working class. 

[Not in the talk, but check out Ian McLagen's version of Lane's "Debris"; Mac's introduction brings out the class issues always present in Lane's work: ]

That last point suggests another motivation for Jagger, et al’s interest in a rock circus: distaste for the growing industry in rock music, and for the notion of rock as mere commerce, coming from the rock groups themselves.  Beatlemania had prompted that group to do the unthinkable for a pop music band, and stop touring.  Was the only alternative for the rock group who desired to be both a commercial and artistic enterprise to retire to the studio?  In dreaming about a rock circus, Jagger and Townshend were also imagining, and asserting, the rock group as an autonomous entity. Their dialogue was also a fledgling effort to imagine an alternative to the standard rock concert at a moment when the concert seemed to be at a crossroads. Fan hysteria for rock stars was the subject of Peter Watkins’s dark, virulent satire of contemporary England, Privilege (1967), also released the same year as the rock circus idea was hatched. From director Watkins’ Marxist perspective, hysterical fans and concert tours revealed the true social function of pop music: containing youth resistance, silencing criticism of the status quo, and, most of all, distracting young people from recognizing their collective potential to effect change.

 However, at the same time as artists and intellectuals of the Old Left like Watkins were criticizing rock politics, the fledgling new left in England was taking rock music more seriously. This entailed thinking about a gathering of rock fans as constituting a progressive community and re-evaluating the meaning of the rock concert.  Mick Farren recalls looking around at the young people in the audience at Bob Dylan’s concert at the Royal Albert Hall in 1966, wondering: “Could all these people be brought back together on other pretexts? When his rebel-stoned electric circus moved on would we all return to our separate and isolated ways?” Most important, Farren asked: “Was it beyond the realm of possibility that we might find other common ground beyond the appreciation” of an artist and their work? I see the rock circus idea as a direct analogue to Farren’s utopian dream of the rock concert as a populist, politically progressive, social gathering. 

(Not in the talk, but check out Farren's remembrance of demos past:

it's a long way to the top

I sometimes think what I love most about rock are songs about rock life, especially about life on the road. Why not blog about it? Warning: what follows reveals my fundamental un-coolness. 


Let's start with this, from Bon Jovi. I love everything about this song; it always convinces me that Jon and the boys suffer greatly while on the road, and that their suffering and alienation is indeed majestic.  The video confirms the fact of their communal suffering. Note the pained look on Jon's face as he pounds the window of the tour bus at 1:47: I am persuaded that it's very hard for Jon to be all alone and think. 
I feel his pain, and I know you do too, Dear Reader: because black and white footage makes everything look great, and everyone elegantly wasted. 

There's also this wonderful piece of rock melancholia from Bob Seger. It's a reminder that once upon a time, wearing long hair entailed personal risk and alienation. 

The mystic chords of memory. Ah, the Seventies! Ah, America! Ah, sexually transmitted disease! 

(Recommended: Yo La Tengo's cover of this on YouTube)


I've always associated these two songs because of their shared vision of the loneliness that comes from growing old in rock. 

But this is the greatest, or at least my favorite, song about growing old in rock.  "Ballad of Mott," etc. is about the pain that comes from realizing there's no escape from choices you made when you were and foolish. Finally though, the song is about turning suffering into an affirmation.  Mott opened their 2009 reunion show at the Hammersmith Apollo with "Ballad": I have to stop typing now, my tears are splashing the keyboard...

The post has already gotten a bit unwieldy, so I'll just mention "Range Life," the slacker version of Mott's "Ballad" by Pavement, and you can find it yourself on YouTube :) 

RIP, REM

Rest in peace, REM. 


Not Brit rock, of course, but then again, REM's first few records are really a paean to the Rickenbacker, the secret weapon of British rock circa Face to Face and, of course, Revolver. (Yes, I know REM probably got this mostly from Roger McGuinn, but where do you think he got it from? Think about it). 

When the world falls apart

It's true: when the world falls apart, like mine did recently, some things stay in place. Music is always there.
Levi Stubb's tears fall down his face. When it's over, and if you're still around, you can play your Four Tops tape, and then put it back in its place.

 Here's one of the records where the tears flowed:

Name checked by legendary rock savant David Johansen in the best New York Dolls song the Dolls never recorded. Heartbreaking. Like all the great Dolls songs, "Frenchette" is hard rock that assumes the search for good times can never be separated from great pain. From the first David Johansen solo album, criminally, still  unavailable on CD or itunes.

Listening List, addendum: white light/white heat

Not really on the listening list, but I thought this might be worth sharing. Yesterday I listened to the Velvet Underground's White Light/White Heat (from the Peel Slowly and See box set) and think I had a epiphany. The disc collects various outtakes recorded for the record. Listening to the instrumental tracks written around the same time like "Booker T," an extended groove perfect for go-go dancing, it struck me that the VU's second album is less an art rock "statement" than the work of an unrepentant dance band with an, let's say, unusual sense of humor.  Yes, the epic nighttown vision of "Sister Ray" may indeed allude to the transgressive fiction of John Rechy and Hubert Selby: but I mostly hear a twisted novelty record: a risk-taking record to be sure, but a novelty record nonetheless.   


So, according to the Faulk hypothesis, "The Gift" is the album's key song, not "Sister Ray."  Dude sends himself through the mail in a large box to Girlfriend; Girlfriend, who is actually bored with Dude, hacks him to death when she tries to open up the package. Hapless Dude dies. Yuk Yuk. That's about it. And the VU know it. When you get tired of hearing John Cale recite the sad story (could that happen, given Cale's awesome Welsh accent?), just turn off one speaker and dance to the instrumental track in the other. That's the main thing.


 (It makes sense that "Hey Mr. Rain," also from the WL/WH sessions, didn't make the final cut for the record; a genuine art rock statement thanks to Cale's stunning viola playing, it would have stood out like a sore thumb on WL/WH.) 

Susan Fast; Listening List #1

I'm reading Susan Fast's book on Led Zeppelin. Surprisingly, it's helped me think about Slade: another British rock band with a decidedly non-ironic, 'realist' aesthetic, characterized by "excessive uses of the body" on stage meant to suggest "emotional outpourings"(6). Neither group got a fair shake from rock critics in the 70s either, especially Zeppelin. Slade had a grudging respect from most rock critics for their  great run of high energy singles, with titles spelled in midlands dialect. 

There are of course are big differences between Slade and Zep; Zep's music is notably eclectic, a trait usually associated with bands that are critical favorites. Slade's musicianship is limited at best, especially compared to Zeppelin. Although the latter band was clearly informed by 60s psychedelia and counterculture ideals, they also seemed to prize the notion of the passionate virtuoso that was a legacy of nineteenth century Romanticism. 

In fact, Zep are so eclectic that it gives Fast pause. She doesn't seem to know quite what to make of one strain of their eclecticism, their incorporation of Brit folk, although she deals at length and with insight on the Orientalism of "Kashmir." But I'm not quibbling: I'm very grateful to Fast for providing me with a vocabulary and methodology that allows me to think critically about less critically respected, more "popular," rock groups of the era.    


While I'm getting my thoughts together on Slade, I thought I'd share my current listening list. My lists are inspired by chance songs I hear on the radio, and also by current reading.  

For instance, I subscribe to "Rock's Back Pages," an online archive of rock criticism from the 1960s onward. It's led me to discover lesser known pieces by rock critics I admire, as well as turned me on to critics I didn't know much about. My current fave rave is Metal Mike Saunders, hailing from the great city of Austin.  Like Lester Bangs, Saunders' early 70s pieces for Creem magazine hail the first wave of British metal bands. At the same time, Saunders has eclectic tastes that also includes what we would now call power pop: Zombies, pre-Tommy Who, Small Faces, and Badfinger. Saunders' bete noir is lethargy, which he hears in Humble Pie, late Cream, and Houses of the Holy. He's often screamingly funny, especially on Humble Pie, whom he regards as the kings of Rock Plod and Lethargy. Poor Steve Marriott! 

Some of my links below came from reading Metal Mike's reviews yesterday; I bet you can guess which ones. 


In no particular order:


Vin Scelsa's show reminded me how much I love the trance-like "Ladies of the Canyon": 

Scelsa also played Dylan's  version of "Barbara Allen" from Live at the Gaslight Cafe (1962), pairing it with Nico's cover of "These Days" (from Chelsea Girls, released Fall 1967, a few months after the Velvets' debut record), utilizing a very similar guitar picking pattern. You can hear the entirety of both Nick Drake and early Roy Harper in the Dylan cover. I can't find it to post, but I'm still looking. Here's Nico in the meanwhile: 

Not really on the list, but how can I post a song from Chelsea Girls and leave out one of the most amazing recordings of all time from the same album:

Unreal. I think I found the Song I want to have played at my Funeral. 

Just discovered this great, funky agit-blues from Eric Burdon and Jimmy Witherspoon. Thanks, Mike Marrone.

Metal Mike Saunders thinks the difference between Badfinger' second record, No Dice (1970) and Straight Up, can be chalked up to the same vices that distinguish the Beatles' Help! from Revolver: high seriousness, lack of energy, overt pretension. He could be right; certainly Straight Up was made under conditions--a rotating line up of producers (George Harrison, then Todd Rundgren), record company pressures--that would have made any group doubt themselves, let alone a band with a genius songwriter suffering from a  tragic lack of self-esteem (Pete Ham, who would later commit suicide). 

To my ears, though, the band sounds more certain and confident about their musicianship and songwriting on Straight Up than on No Dice: how can you argue with "Baby Blue," Metal Mike?

You decide; here's No Matter What, from No Dice. 

 

From Straight Up:

Listen to those cavernous drums! Praise be to Todd, (aka God), for verily he knows how to get a great drum sound.  

Vashti Bunyan gets on the play list, thanks to Rebecca. 


And then there's this; the Heep at their oddest and loosest. I even hear a bit of Music Machine garage -psychedelia in this. Sadly, Heep became practically unlistenable for me after this, though I make an exception for the odd-man-out folk rock song, "The Wizard." 

Picture this: you're sitting around the campfire in a forest, like you always do. Suddenly a little hobbit dude bums a cig (you still smoked in the 70s), asks for some wine from your hip flask, and discourses on universal love and brotherhood. Of course, they had me at "campfire." If you cannot resist a hobbit dude dreaming the hippie dream, mister, you're a better man than I.

 

Rock and music hall in 1970s Britain

Finally back at work on an essay on music hall in British rock music in the 1970s. The idea came to me when I was completing the BRM project. There were countless rock artists who adapted or alluded to music hall style in the decade, from Bowie and the Sex Pistols, to Kevin Coyne, Ian Dury, and the Sensational Alex Harvey Band. There was far more to the story than I had room for in the book. 


The new essay traces the rise of the rock/music hall sub-genre; in various ways, the bands that appropriated music hall style were searching for  a way to signify their discontent with art rock, or with 60s counterculture. It took a bit of work to limit my focus, since there are so many bands that fit in the genre. My primary focus will be on three groups: Slade, the Moodies, and Sham 69. These bands suggest the diversity of the genre, as well as a shared critique of rock's new aspirations to art.  


I originally planned to include Ian Dury in the essay, but the more I learned about him, the more I regarded him as an exceptional case. It's true that Dury's debt to music hall performers like Max Wall and the raunchy Max Miller is obvious enough. It's also the case that Dury conceived of himself more as a popular entertainer in the music hall tradition than as a "rock star." Yet unlike the bands I discuss, Dury and the Blockheads have a mostly uncontentious relation to 60s rock icons or the counterculture. Moreover, Dury's self-conception and star image as a master of the vernacular, a quintessentially British wordsmith, doesn't quite fit with the story I'm trying to tell. I didn't think I could tell the story of Slade, etc. and do justice to Dury's complex case. 


I finally saw the Ian Dury biopic, Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll (2010), and thought I would blog a bit about it here: but it left me cold. There are some good performances, but overall, it tries a bit too hard. Too bad: an important part of the story of UK punk is the contribution made by artists who were fellow travelers in the movement but not really 'punks' themselves: Elvis Costello, Graham Parker, Lene Lovich, John Cooper Clarke; hell, nearly the entire roster of the Stiff record label. Like Dury, most of these artists were still rooted in the music of the 1960s, but managed to be credible to the punks as well. This movie didn't tell that story. Nor did it have any insights into Dury's performance style or musical taste; it just take these things for granted.  If you want to see a surreal rock bio-pic, you're still better off watching 24 Hour Party People again (2004, dir. Michael Winterbottom). Here's my favorite scene: 

Music hall rock has something to do with the sea change that transformed British society, at the start of very bleak decade. 70s Britain was marked by social unrest: worker's strikes, government declared states of emergency, IRA bombings, rampant inflation, massive unemployment. The situation in British rock was similarly divisive. 

The new, though not necessarily younger, bands like Slade and T.Rex were polarizing, pitting a younger rock audience against their older brother's and sister. At stake seemed to be the future of rock: was it music for students (read: intellectual), or was it for the kids?

(As Bill Inglot notes, was there EVER a greater example of the album cover as mission statement?)

It was perhaps inevitable given the spirit of contention that marked the times that Marc Bolan and Slade came to symbolize a backlash against the 60s, even if Bolan himself was a product of that decade if there ever was one.

My larger point in the essay is that music hall style gained a new significance at this moment, distinct from its older meaning and its history. Music hall performance put a premium on entertaining audiences. Singing involved audience participation; comic skits broke down the fourth wall. Utilizing many of the same devices, rock groups like Slade set themselves apart from rock groups more more interested in attaining artistic distinction than entertainment. 


I plan to  treat Slade, Sham 69, and the Moodies in

separate sections of the essay. I also want to share my writing process as I go along,on this blog; please stay tuned!  

Slade and the Who

 

Here are more notes toward the 70s rock and music hall paper; I argue that 70s British rock groups appropriated music hall style as a symbolic protest against the hegemony of 60s art rock as well as counterculture politics.  


The first section of the paper is on Slade, who I regard as the forerunner of the music hall revival in early 70s British rock.  Although Slade was clearly in the same hard rock tradition as the Who, there were crucial differences. There were few pretensions to art in Slade's music; unlike Pete Townshend, the Who's chief songwriter, none of the members seemed to be on a spiritual quest. Slade didn't truck in counterculture posturing either; in fact, they gained their initial notoriety in the English press by dressing as skinheads, the mortal enemy of hippie. 



Part of the essay will focus on the image of the band constructed by the British rock press. Slade's popularity with teens came to signify a broader, generational divide in the British rock audience. Mick Farren's review of the Stones' Exile on Main Street (in the underground paper It) is typical; Farren interprets the success of bands like Slade and T. Rex as evidence that the Stones had lost a hold on younger audiences, going as far as attribute the bleak, depressive mood of the record to the Stones' own awareness of their obsolescence.  


The controversy about Slade was a new version of the old art versus entertainment debate. More specifically, it pit the new intellectual approach to rock against less cerebral modes of fandom. Slade quickly came to represent the popular/populist rejection of the experimental trend in British rock that emerged in the late 1960s, with its aspiration to art. The revolt against rock modernism was also the rejection of the bourgeois values enshrined at the heart of the music: the belief in the intrinsic value of musical virtuosity, in rock music as intellectually improving. It's not surprising then, that the representation of Slade in the music press was filtered through class.  



Nick Logan's 1972 interview with Pete Townshend provides a snapshot of the self-questioning that Slade's success provoked among the rock intelligentsia. The quotes below are from a reprint of the essay in a special issue of Uncut magazine.   

The interview is remarkable for several reasons, not the least of which is Townshend's lucid view of the role that fantasies of classless slumming played in his early songwriting.  "You hear skinheads saying, 'There we all were, marching down the King's Road--it was the most incredible sight you've ever seen': but I recall the same feeling.... What was so great was the unanimity of it, the way I could blend in and be one of them. There was no class thing." At the same time, Townshend has a clear view of how class divides rock musicians from their audience. When Logan asks Townshend if he wants to "reach and speak to those people again...[just] as Slade, arguably, do now," the songwriter's response is unambiguous: "I never ever spoke to them. I like to think I entertained and spoke for them at that time." He adds,"I am a student, all my friends are students or ex-students....its much easier for me to write songs and speak for students than working-class teenagers." 


Although Townshend demonstrates his deep insight into the class dynamics of British rock, he also reinforces some class prejudices at the same time, hinting that Slade and their audience are a bit "thick," compared to the middle class that Townshend writes for.  Although he likes Slade and regards them as a "group in the Who tradition" (interestingly, he also places the Faces and Marc Bolan in the same tradition while complaining that Bolan willfully obscures his pedigree), Townshend can't resist adding that Slade are "not so clever, much simpler, less complicated. They are four Rogers, if you like--there isn't an intellectual in Slade." 


Four Rogers! Ouch. Townshend's remark recalls Lester Bangs' similar comment on Slade: "They're just like the Beatles, if they were all Ringo." Unlike Townshend, Bangs defiantly positions along himself with Slade on the populist side of the art/entertainment divide, at the same time doing a bit of slumming himself. To be a group of all Ringos or Rogers is not-so-subtle code for being "mere" entertainment in a rock world where having art pretensions is both recognized and  rewarded.

Long Postscript. The Logan interview captures Townshend in a rare moment of self-esteem: "the good thing I'm going through at the moment is a kind of renaissance in songwriting, which is a strange process. Suddenly, I found myself writing songs as if they could have been written in 1965." 


Well, not quite. In the 60s, Townshend was preoccupied with Mod kids; nearly (only?) a decade later, he's more interested in the idea of youth subculture (he's just beginning to conceive of Quadrophenia, a concept album about Mod), counterculture, and the struggle against authority.  Songs like "The Relay" and "Let's See Action" are highly encoded representations of counterculture insurgency, about a shadowy revolutionary underground that has slipped the yoke of "Control." As the idea of youth revolution becomes more unreal, Townshend's image of insurgent youth also becomes more abstract, encrypted.  (I just ordered Richie Unterberger's new book on the early 70s Who; I'm worried that he will confirm my suspicion that Townshend's idea in Lifehouse of a tribal youth underground living outside of the grid was lifted from Philip Jose Farmer's reactionary anti-Welfare State allegory, "Riders of the Purple Wage" (1967). I really hope I'm wrong).  

"The Relay" has likely been forgotten even by Who fans, but it remains one of my favorites, if only because of the wonderful interplay between Moon and Townshend on the track. Moon does his usual job of holding down the beat without keeping time; sadly, he took the secret of how he did such feats with him to the grave. Townshend's guitar playing here ingeniously combines rhythm and lead, just as he did on the Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again."  The results aren't as quite as spectacular, or grandiose, as that: but it's pretty close. 

Back to Slade: their links to music hall tradition are more evident in performance, in their highly interactive live shows, than on record. Luckily, there's some great footage of early Slade live on YouTube: more about this in my next post.